awaiting Betty Shabazz’s arrival. The combined entourage of Black Panthers then escorted her to an interview with Eldridge Cleaver at Ramparts headquarters in North Beach, with the police following them.
On the street outside the Ramparts offices, about a hundred policemen confronted the black militants before they entered the building. Eldridge Cleaver enjoyed the tableau from inside his office. Newton accused one of the policemen of having an itchy finger and dared him to draw. Seale immediately realized how close Newton had then come to a shootout: “If just one of them had gone for his gun, he would blast him, because Huey had his gun at a 45-degree angle to the ground and he was ready. He had the barrel of the gun in his left hand. His finger was on the trigger, he had knocked the safety off, and had jacked a round into the chamber.”14
The police backed off, but they recognized that this was an ugly sign of more local armed confrontations to come. Incidents were occurring with greater frequency across the country. In June, a group of whites in Prattville, Alabama, would empty their rifles into homes in a black neighborhood, prompting SNCC leader, H. Rap Brown, to call for “full retaliation.” Brown characterized Alabama as the “starting battleground for America’s race war.”15 Brown also encouraged violent confrontations elsewhere, repeating before various audiences his strong support for armed self-defense: “If America chooses to play Nazis, black folks ain’t going to play Jews.”16
In April 1967 came another catalyst. In nearby Richmond, California, Mark Comfort saw an opportunity for action — the recent killing by a sheriff’s deputy of unarmed 22-year-old Denzil Dowell. Comfort alerted Seale and Newton, who attracted hundreds of angry residents to a protest rally. Large numbers of police stood safely at the crowd’s edges. The deputy had insisted he was justified in shooting Dowell for fleeing arrest for attempted burglary. The family cast doubt on the deputy’s story: by their tally, three times as many shots had been fired as officially reported and two patches of blood on the ground indicated that Dowell’s body had been dragged to where it lay when found. The attending doctor told them that the angle of the wounds indicated that Dowell’s arms were raised when he was shot. The family got nowhere with their complaints to authorities so armed Panthers in uniform marched in to speak first with the district attorney and then the sheriff. They got nowhere either except to escalate the already tense stand-off between the Richmond police and the local black community.
Before forming the Panthers, Seale had already been working for a few years at community-building in North Richmond, which, even more dramatically than Oakland, had become a breeding ground for deep resentment toward local police. At the beginning of World War II, fewer than 300 blacks lived in the city. Richmond’s black population increased over 5,000 percent in seven years as Southern transplants were lured into overcrowded neighborhoods to work on defense contracts and in shipyards.
In light of Denzil Dowell’s death, Cleaver suggested they start a newsletter with the Richmond killing as the lead story of its first issue. It ought to prove as much of a lightning rod as Matthew Johnson’s death had been in San Francisco’s black community. Beverly Axelrod helped them craft two mimeographed pages in her living room while Bob Dylan’s 1964 album The Times They Are A-Changin’ blared on the phonograph. The Panthers took to playing Dylan’s 1965 album Highway 61 Revisited every time they gathered to put out the paper. Newton particularly enjoyed the anti-establishment lyrics to “Ballad of a Thin Man,” which included the line “Something is happening here, but you don’t know what it is, do you, Mr. Jones?”17 Having the Black Panthers congregate in her home to launch their new party’s messages of defiance against police brutality exhilarated Axelrod. She was deeply in love with Eldridge. Her circle of leftists had just celebrated the pair’s engagement at a publication party for his book Soul On Ice. This was the revolutionary relationship she had always coveted.
The first issue of the paper was fairly basic and crude-looking, with a simple layout. Everything about the issue suggested amateurs at work, much like the first issue of the underground Berkeley Barb, which would soon achieve the highest national circulation for any newspaper of its kind. What mattered is that they got the word out from the outraged community’s perspective. Twenty-three-year-old San Franciscan Emory Douglas had joined the Panthers in mid-January of 1967. As a teenager he had worked in a printing shop while serving a sentence in a juvenile detention facility in Southern California. He later studied graphic design at San Francisco City College where he was active in the Black Student Union. When Douglas saw Bobby Seale working on the primitive first issue of the Panther newspaper, Douglas told Seale he could improve on the graphics. Douglas took over production of later issues with the title “revolutionary artist” and later Minister of Culture.
By the second issue in mid-May, they launched a far more professional-looking Black Panther newspaper, published biweekly in a print shop under Douglas’s guiding hand. As he began to help Douglas with the paper, Anthony came to understand that the Communist Party was financing the paper for mass distribution. All the Panther members distributed papers to tell their story and promote their 10-point program. Sales soon regularly exceeded 100,000 per issue; proceeds from the sales of the newsletters became the Panthers’ primary source of income. They raised the price first to fifteen cents, then a quarter apiece. Each edition included blistering criticisms of racist policing and plenty of pictures and cartoons to communicate their message through imagery. Huey Newton had asked Douglas to be aware that “basically, the African-American community wasn’t a reading community. They learned through observation and participation.”
The Panthers were the first to popularize the term “pigs” for police, based on a postcard cartoon Beverly Axelrod had passed on to them. The first images Emory Douglas did were pig drawings, meant to be a symbol of police oppression — a “low-natured beast that bites the hand that feeds it.” Douglas put a badge on the pig and sometimes gave it a number — that of Oakland Officer John Frey, who had a reputation in the community for mistreating blacks on his West Oakland beat well before his fateful encounter with Huey Newton on October 28, 1967.
Douglas, Newton and Seale had a new assistant in their all-night efforts to get out the Black Panther newspaper every couple of weeks: Earl Anthony. Anthony became the eighth official member of the Black Panther Party. To show force in San Francisco and Richmond earlier in the year, the Panthers had bolstered their numbers by inviting along armed friends who just dressed for the occasion without being members of the Party. Cleaver had been suspicious at first of Anthony because of his ties to Maulana Ron Karenga, founder of the black nationalist group “US” in Los Angeles and Anthony’s association with Black Muslims in San Francisco. But Anthony was a “renegade” Black Muslim, the label applied to Black Muslims who took drugs and womanized, a subgroup Cleaver could identify with. He had been a Black Muslim himself in prison. Anthony broke with his own rent-strike organization to join the Panthers after seeing them in action in San Francisco.
Other black militants Anthony knew were now shunning white alliances. SNCC had recently purged whites from its Atlanta headquarters. The Black Muslims in San Francisco suspected that Axelrod funneled money from the Communist Party to pay for Black House; that was not who Black Nationalists wanted interfering with their own agenda. What Anthony did not tell anyone is that two FBI agents whom he used to know from his old school sports teams had recently contacted him. Anthony came from a middle class family. In college at the University of Southern California, he had been a young Republican. The two fair-haired, white ex-Marines who showed up at his San Francisco apartment out of the blue warned Anthony that Eldridge Cleaver was associating with Communists and asked him to keep a look out. At the time, Anthony took it as a friendly warning.
When the pair of FBI agents later asked Anthony what he knew about the sudden disappearance from the Bay Area of the San Francisco Panthers that spring, he told them that Cleaver had scared them off. Maybe he had pistol-whipped a few first; Anthony would not always tell the FBI men all he knew. Meanwhile, the Panthers were becoming a subcultural force that increasing numbers of blacks admired. Anthony had driven Huey Newton to the Richmond gathering in honor of Denzil Dowell. Anthony had been involved in both the Watts riots in 1965 and the San Francisco riots in 1966, but had never witnessed anyone take charge of a crowd like Seale and Newton did that day. Watching the police look on in apprehension from the sidelines